Powder bed manufacturing methods such as selective laser melting or selective laser sintering are relatively well known methods for fabricating, prototyping or manufacturing parts or components from powder material, for instance. Conventional apparatuses or setups for such methods usually comprise a manufacturing or build platform on which the component is built layer-by-layer after the feeding of a layer of base material which may then be melted, e.g. by the energy of a laser beam and subsequently solidified. The layer thickness is determined by a wiper that moves, e.g. automatically, over the powder bed and removes excess material. Typical layer thicknesses amount to 20 μm or 40 μm. During the manufacture, said laser beam scans over the surface and melts the powder on selected areas which may be predetermined by a CAD-file according to the geometry of the component to be manufactured.
A method of selective laser melting is known from EP 2 601 006 B1, for example.
The term “component” as used herein, advantageously pertains to a ceramic or metallic component. More advantageously, the components may pertain to components of a turbine, such as a gas turbine.
In the additive manufacture of large parts of components, e.g. by selective laser melting or electron beam melting, there is a large risk of wasted resources and/or built failure due to long associated build times. Particularly, if the build job fails in the middle of the buildup or when the build job is manufactured e.g. halfway, the part is normally wasted and a new manufacturing process has to be started from the beginning. This results in wasted time, raw material, and money.
It seems that there is no actual solution to the mentioned problems, wherein a build job, once it has catastrophically failed, i.e. the build cannot be recovered from within the machine environment, can be recovered and/or continued. Instead, the build job of the wrongly or falsely manufactured component has to be cancelled and the corresponding structure is wasted or scrapped.